Life's Best Medicine Podcast · Dr. Brian Lenzkes

Episode 287: David Schmitz

·1 hr 9 min·3 clips

After two days of fenbendazole, he forgot Lamotrigine for the first time in five years.

1. Life's Best Medicine Podcast Episode 287 centers on Dave Schmitz's account of weight loss, bipolar diagnosis, carnivore eating, and stopping Lamotrigine. 2. Brian Lenzkes hosts the conversation, and Dave Schmitz is the guest because his story connects low-carb food, a keto bakery, and mental health changes. 3. The episode asks whether diet, parasite treatment, and other environmental factors can change symptoms that had been labeled bipolar disorder. 4. Dave says he saw 278 pounds on the scale before reading about low-carb diets and making a change. 5. He describes adding Health Code daily, eating high-protein and healthy-fat meal replacements, and noticing less hunger for hours. 6. Dave says he and his wife bought a bakery and turned it into a keto bakery and a carnivore restaurant. 7. He says he moved from keto to six months of carnivore, using butter, tallow, kielbasa, eggs, and grass-fed, grass-finished beef. 8. Dave says he had taken Lamotrigine for about five years after a doctor told him he was bipolar and would stay on medication until he died. 9. He says fenbendazole, which he bought while getting chicken feed at Tractor Supply, coincided with missing his Lamotrigine on the third day. 10. Brian compares Dave's experience with patients who improved on ketogenic diets, including a woman from Mexico City whose IBS disappeared after COVID and ivermectin. 11. Dave says Lamotrigine made him care less about people, while carnivore eating made him feel calmer and more able to interact. 12. He says he also had ADHD since childhood, with Ritalin in the 1980s and early 1990s, and he links ADHD, autism, and bipolar disorder. 13. Brian raises the role of mercury, aluminum, and other exposures, including dental amalgams and flu shots, as possible contributors to brain symptoms. 14. Dave says he has been reading about helminths, hygiene hypothesis, and the possibility that over-deworming could affect autoimmune risk later in life. 15. The discussion turns to toxoplasmosis, with Brian describing how it can change animal behavior and how cat exposure may matter. 16. Brian also describes his mother's bipolar illness and his niece's autism, using both cases to argue that food and inflammation can shift symptoms. 17. The tone is conversational and exploratory, with Brian prompting Dave for timelines, medication details, and concrete examples from his own life. 18. The format stays interview-based, moving from personal testimony into side discussions about psychiatry, food systems, and supply-chain concerns. 19. People interested in carnivore, keto, psychiatry, and parasite theories would likely listen. 20. People wanting a narrow clinical discussion without politics or food-system critiques might skip it.

As heard by us

A blunt, high conviction health conversation about food sourcing, diet, and everyday tradeoffs.

Life's Best Medicine stays loose and opinionated, moving from family habits and work to keto, carnivore eating, and the question of where meat comes from. It is at its best when it turns big health anxieties into everyday choices, instead of pretending the answers are neat.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a carnivore and keto conversation that keeps circling back to where food comes from.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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